Dubai: “I have never felt so deeply insulted. At one point, I even thought of quitting [the post of chief minister (CM)].”
The angry and unprecedented outburst from West Bengal Mamata Banerjee took mediapersons by surprise during a press briefing at ‘Nabanna’, the state secretariat, in Kolkata on July 4.
Earlier, on July 2, communal clashes in Baduria, in North 24-Parganas district, had resulted in the death of one person and left 25 persons, including 20 policemen, injured.
As state Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi called up Banerjee and demanded an explanation over the episode, a war-of-words ensued between the CM and the constitutional head of the state, resulting in Banerjee’s sharp reaction minutes later.
From the lush green hills of Darjeeling to the hinterlands of Barasat, socio-political and communal discord have suddenly brought the eastern Indian state in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Separatist movement
While the colonial-era hill station of Darjeeling has been smouldering for the last one month over a renewed demand for a separate Gorkhaland state, communal clashes — triggered by a malicious Facebook post — in Baduria, near Barasat, in the plains have evoked a battle of political one-upmanship between the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state.
BJP has demanded imposition of President’s Rule in Bengal over what it claimed is a breakdown in the state’s law and order situation.
BJP parliamentarians Meenakshi Lekhi, Satyapal Singh and Om Mathur were stopped by the police near Kolkata airport last Sunday, as they were headed to Baduria for a ground report.
“By not allowing us to visit Baduria, the government of West Bengal has made it quite clear that it wants to hide more than what it wants to reveal,” Lekhi told Gulf News from New Delhi on Monday.
“The TMC has been appeasing communal elements on either side of the border, resulting in a dangerous nexus between TMC and anti-socials, and insurgents involved in cattle smuggling, human trafficking, drug smuggling and even terrorism. This is a terrible situation,” she added.
Disharmony
The TMC has, in its turn, blamed the BJP for hobnobbing with Gorkha Janmukti Morcha and fomenting trouble in the hills and raking up communal disharmony in the plains for narrow political gains.
When Banerjee came to power in 2011, one key facet of her success was the huge support her party, TMC, had won from the minority community. Muslims in West Bengal typically constitute 27.5 per cent of the total vote share. Since 1977, Muslims had been staunch supporters of the Left owing to the secular ideology it expounded.
Playing a decisive role
The first signs of this ‘vote bank’ shifting away from the Left were noticed during the 2008 Panchayat (local rural self-government) elections, when TMC made stunning inroads into the Left bastion and the Left Front’s vote share spectacularly dropped from an all-time high of almost 90 per cent to 52 per cent.
Then came Banerjee’s stupendous success in the 2011 assembly elections, when Muslim voters junked CPM and sided with Banerjee. In roughly 95 of the 294 assembly seats, Muslim voters have traditionally played a decisive role.
However, while the TMC has so far managed to retain its vote share among the minority community, the 2014 general elections revealed an emerging trend as the BJP surprisingly mustered an all-time high 14 per cent vote share in the state — primarily by partially consolidating its vote among the majority community in urban and semi-urban areas.
Main opposition
In Bengal, typically, the party has not been able to muster anything more than a 2-3 per cent vote share. But from 2014-2017, in terms of vote share and visibility, BJP has emerged as the main opposition force in the state.
In the last parliamentary by-election in Cooch Behar in November 2016, BJP’s vote share was an impressive 28.5 per cent, giving TMC enough reasons to worry.
Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of Bharatiya Jana Sangh, to which the BJP owes its political DNA, hailed from Bengal. Yet, historically, the saffron brigade has never managed to make much of an impact on the socio-political and intellectual template of Bengal.
However, that familiar narrative started changing with the 2014 general elections.
Banerjee’s bid to retain the minority ‘vote bank’ and the BJP’s game plan to consolidate the majority Hindu vote have crossed swords like never before, with the Left and Congress reduced to virtual also-rans in this make-or-break turf war.
